Blood may outdamage Unholy/Frost now

[Schizoide]

Interesting discussion coming up on twitter.

Everybody paying attention already knows Blood DKs have scary strong runic power generation due to Blood spec's powerful synergy between Haste and Multistrike from the Runic Strikes passive (listed as Blood Rites below) and the Veteran of the Third War passive. We all looked at that in beta, decided it was clearly going to be a problem in later gear tiers, and provided consistent feedback saying so.

It was not fixed, and so far is not fixed for 6.1. Hope we can change that here today.

Back in beta we figured it would lead to an interesting choice between bleeding off extra Runic Power to Conversion or Breath of Sindragosa in later raid tiers. But we missed a few points. First is that the glyph of Icy Runes offers a ton of Runic Power generation. But who cares, right? That eats Frost runes, which means you can't Death Strike, which means you're a much less useful tank, so that's a potentially interesting (and possibly OK) tradeoff.

Thing is, until now, nobody actually tested it in a raid. When you're:

1) Generating 1 RP/sec passively from VotTW passive
2) Generating 15 RP whenever an autoattack multistrikes from Runic Strike/Blood Rites passives. (And autoattack speed scales with haste, remember. That's the dangerous synergy between those two stats.)
3) Get +10% Haste and multistrike from the VotTW passive
4) Get an additional 5% Multistrike from the Runic Strikes passive
5) Glyph Icy Runes so Chains of Ice generates 20RP from each Frost rune, and spend most Frost and Death runes on Chains of Ice
6) Gear for multistrike, and get a bunch of it as gear improves throughout the expansion

Well, you can keep Breath of Sindragosa up forever, performing like Simetrik and substantially outdamaging DPS DKs. You're a crappy tank, true. But you can replace a DPS so who cares?

Now I fully expect the devs to simply nerf the glyph of Icy Runes. But that's the wrong way to go, it will just delay the problem until we get enough Haste and Multistrike from later gear and are back in the same spot. The right way is to fix Runic Strikes/Blood Rites to eliminate the synergy between Haste and Multistrike. DKs should be constrained by their resources. The real problem is Blood's resource generation. If that isn't fixed, it will cause problems elsewhere.

[Skullflower]

Inb4 fix!

I'd be more specific with the title though. This playstyle is only viable for sustained 3+ target cleave, i.e. Flambender and Maidens. As well as if you aren't assigned to go up on the boats for Maidens. Every other fight, Unholy could easily beat.

[Reniat]

Breath is good, but it's not as good as you're making it out to be. trading half a death strike for 20 RP isn't worth it unless you are otherwise going to lose BoS, and even then you're taking a chance that it doesn't fall off anyway if you don't some ms procs. We will have incredible BoS uptime as we get more multistrike, but it's not going to make us overpowered. Look at butcher logs: all the top parses are using BoS and even at the 99th percentile we are still second from bottom, albeit close to the leaders. Keep in mind that BoS is very fight dependent, and there are many fights where BoS isn't even practical. Single target it's a given, assuming you can play it right, 2 targets it gets iffier, and if you're talking 4+ you're generally going to see a lot more use out of defile unless there is TONS of movement.

[Schizoide]

I did say may. We're just barely into heroic BRF now. If this isn't fixed standard blood will be maximizing BoS uptime, rendering Defile and NPlague (heh, don't even know why I felt compelled to mention NP) largely obsolete because they can't take advantage of our monstrous Runic Power generation. Even if it doesn't outdamage DPS DKs on every fight, Blood will drastically outdamage other tanks on easy content and when offtanking, leading to a cycle of damage nerfs every single patch until the underlying problem is fixed.

@Reniat: I agree that it makes for a much less effective tank, and discuss that in the post. When you can outdamage a DPS DK, that's not a problem. And as above, the ability to substantially outdamage other tanks is a concern too. And it will get much more apparent that this is a problem as we get better gear.

[Reniat]

@Reniat: I agree that it makes for a much less effective tank, and discuss that in the post. When you can outdamage a DPS DK, that's not a problem. And as above, the ability to substantially outdamage other tanks is a concern too.

But i wasn't talking about survivability. I'm saying damage wise it's not worth throwing away your death strikes for rp. Using Chains over a death strike gives you 20 rp more than if you had just used Death Strike, and you've lost an entire cast of DS (which is our biggest hitter per GCD single target). In other words, you've gained 1.333 ticks of BoS at the cost of an ability that hits harder than 2 ticks of BoS. This is single target, btw.

[Schizoide]

But i wasn't talking about survivability. I'm saying damage wise it's not worth throwing away your death strikes for rp.

Depending on the number of targets, you would tradeoff more or less death strikes for chains of ice. Also remember there's an orphan unholy rune to be spent too.

Point was that 100% uptime is possible now, when nobody even has mythic BRF gear. The first tier of the expansion. Later on in the expansion, there'll be metric tons of RP to bleed off. It's a problem. A real problem. It needs a real fix, not just a nerf to the chains of ice glyph. Or another increase in Blood's BoS RP cost, I guess, which is equally likely.

[Raikh]

Agree on the glyph of icy runes part. For BoS a certain amount of resources is not necessarily the amount of dmg the ability does do with that resources, simply because getting resources at a crucial point gives us the chance to generate more resources to use on BoS, so 15 rp extra are not necessarily one tick of BoS dmg you gain but possibly far more.

We currently face a content where you can basically get multistrike on almost every slot, even 2 trinkets, they are dps rinket, but have a huge stat budget and aren't entirely bad for a blood dk either.
Glyph of icy runes is essentially a gap closer, if you had 100% MS you would not need it as long as you can hit your target to keep BoS up indefinitely.
The more MS you gather the higher the chance of having BoS for the entire fight.
On top of that, if you could keep it up without icy runes, you didn't even have to trade runes for CoI, meaning more survivability and more damage, which is far worse than trading it for keeping BoS up.
Considering that we haven't reached a point where someone is fully decked in MS gear of high level we haven't seen how close we can get to a full uptime without icy runes, icy runes is definitiely not the part to attack here.
Runic strikes is what make sit possible in the end, not the glyph. But that again has consequences.

Another problem on top of this is that we can talk about playing blood as a dps spec. We don't necessarily have to actually tank to pull that off. So in consequence we would be a competitive dps spec, taking basically no dmg as we have huge amount of self heal and defensive cooldowns, are automatically a tank replacement if one dies and even if we wouldn't surpass the actual dps specs in every situation and maybe even if we were 10% weaker, we would be more attractive for the raid as a dps than the actual dps specs.

The problem can be fixed in two ways without being a futile band-aid fix. One is like said, change runic strikes, which would be mechanical change as both compensation to survivability and dmg would need to be done to not leave the blood dk in the gutter, which might change depending on what they do, how we play the spec.
A second one would be to change BoS into a model where it is impossible to pull a 100% uptime off. Fix duration, increased costs for more dmg or even reduce costs along with dmg, to flatten the gain to an acceptable degree.
But changing BoS can easily backfire on our dps specs, ina good and in a bad way as BoS is definitely far from perfect for our dps specs.

What matters the most is ultiamtely of how much importance this problem is. Can this be done for any boss to the degree that blood can perform as a full dps spec or even better or are certain conditions required which only work in a gimmick situation?
How much rng is behind it to reach that level of dps. The more runic strikes you get the less CoI you need to use. BoS alone won't outdps an actual dps spec.
I doubt that its impossible to do on most encounter therefore needs a fix but one that doesn't hurt us any further.
Recent changes are already showing how much of a clusterfuck this class truly is in the end and the only thing that decides how good we are is how powerful a brute force approach on a boss works as we have great synergy with any mechanics and even if are far from best at it, referring to mostly our ds specs.

[Fenrkyr]

They have already shown a desire to reduce RP generation in PVP, so nerfing the glyph is the likely fix for this. That takes a few minutes of coding, where altering the haste/Runic Strikes issue would take much more consideration and iteration. DK's PVP performance is far secondary to balancing tank PVE performance in Blizzards priority system.

[Schizoide]

nerfing the glyph is the likely fix for this.

Of course. But that's only a bandaid, the problem will return a bit later on.

[altR magician]

does breath still pull a ton of threat? will the blood dk actually have to tank the bosses while breathing for an entire fight, or would blood dps be a thing again

[Tojara]

Not surprised. Lots of different factors that play into whether you want to abuse it or not though.

I'm of the mindset that as a tank you should always be maximizing your damage, but this play style (at least currently) has the trade-off of sacrificing a decent chunk of mitigation. But the DPS trade off is actually quite high. Lastly while BoS is great on single target, it really shines on 2-3 targets to which there are on several encounters like that in BRF. Lastly you have to consider (again, if you're tanking) if the mitigation trade-off is worth the damage increase of the bosses. We haven't tried say Maidens on heroic, but looking at logs it didn't look like he was a burden to heal on heroic.

Remember the other point of the thread is using this as an actual DPS DK. Why play frost and unholy on such fights when you can do more damage than both of those specs, and have the added benefit of not being a target of many mechanics and basically being a target healers can effectively ignore. Mind you it's not a lot of encounters, but if your guild runs say 2 DPS DKs and one blood DK you could do maidens with 1 blood DK being an actually tank 'tank' while the other two just do it to maximize DPS. Bringing in two "DPS" that need 0 effective healing throughout the encounter, do amazing DPS and aren't targeted by most abilities sounds good to me. Not to mention unlike gladiator stance warriors, if a tank does end up going down you can be an effective tank if you chose to be on the spot.

The glyph might be a problem right now, but it's only temporary. With proper trinkets and the best itemized gear the potential for it being up 100% or nearly 100% of the time is already a reality. Personally I like how BoS plays though, but I might be in the minority here.

Threat really wouldn't be an issue either. While it's powerful on single target as well, it's likely not overpowering to the extent that it would pull of an actual tank doing single target damage to that boss. Even if you do pull off, it's not like you're going to die (you're an actual tanking specialization unlike gladiator stance warriors). Boneshield will be up 100% of the time, you should have well over a +30% health buffer from BoS being up constantly, you still have personal CDs and the actual tank can just taunt back get a threat boost momentarily. Each time a taunt happens it becomes less and less likely as a fight progresses that you would be able to catch back up.

[Vereesa]

Yet none of this is news. This has been public knowledge for months - since early beta and now that we're getting to the appropriate gear level, exactly what was predicted is happening.

Of course none of this would've happened if they'd actually made changes in accordance with player feedback. I fully expect a kneejerk nerf out of the blue as has been the case for a lot of the DK changes as of late.

[Schizoide]

Yet none of this is news. This has been public knowledge for months - since early beta and now that we're getting to the appropriate gear level, exactly what was predicted is happening.

Yes, exactly. Well, I don't think anyone anticipated blood outdamaging DPS specs, but we all knew the RP generation would be a problem.

@altR magician: You'd need to be in blood presence to get the flat damage dealt percent modifier, and damage = threat. So if you outdamage the actual tank by 10% (in melee range), yeah, you'll be tanking.

[Raiju]

Yes, exactly. Well, I don't think anyone anticipated blood outdamaging DPS specs, but we all knew the RP generation would be a problem.

We had pretty much exactly the same thread in early highmaul here, just using the pvp glove bonus to give another +10 on icy runes.

They removed that, meaning it was more difficult to keep up until you got more gear (i.e. now)

[Schizoide]

Yeah, that was stacked with the glyph of Icy Runes. Now in ~680 gear, we don't need it. After they inevitably nerf the glyph (and it is inevitable, even though we're all trying to argue against it), I wonder how much more gear we'll need before it comes up again? Mythic BRF could definitely do it.

[altR magician]

just tried it single target on blackhand, doesn't look like it would be as viable as it would be on a council fight

[Saybel]

Can we just stop this sillyness already and just make BoS an improved Death Coil/Frost Strike like Defile is an improved DnD and Necrotic Plague is improved BB+FF ("Improved").

BoS is fine guys, very engaging and interesting talent, lol jk you spend half of it AFKing so you don't cap RP.

*And not pressing Death Coil which creates shitloads of artificial downtime, even if you are technically using an ability.

[Vereesa]

Yeah, that was stacked with the glyph of Icy Runes. Now in ~680 gear, we don't need it. After they inevitably nerf the glyph (and it is inevitable, even though we're all trying to argue against it), I wonder how much more gear we'll need before it comes up again? Mythic BRF could definitely do it.

The above was my damage breakdown for tonight's Iron Maidens kill whilst trying to game BoS uptime and use as many BBs as possible on the main platform. With that said I'm still a fair bit from full multistrike and/or 695 ilevel which could easily close the 50% gap.

[Saybel]

The above was my damage breakdown for tonight's Iron Maidens kill whilst trying to game BoS uptime and use as many BBs as possible on the main platform. With that said I'm still a fair bit from full multistrike and/or 695 ilevel which could easily close the 50% gap.

Mine looks pretty similar to that, what's it looking like on damage breakdown?

[Deleted]

Inb4 fix!

I'd be more specific with the title though. This playstyle is only viable for sustained 3+ target cleave, i.e. Flambender and Maidens. As well as if you aren't assigned to go up on the boats for Maidens. Every other fight, Unholy could easily beat.

It is in fact within 10% difference with unholy even on 2 target fights, see Twins log ranking, the top blood DK (who was tanking at the time), did 38.3k post BB nerf.

That is WHILE tanking, imagine if he wasnt and gear up full for MS, Also there is a very skewed sample size considering how many DPS DK there are vs Tank DK.

All in all, blood is very strong when it comes to more than 1 target, i wish you could do some sims on it and add it to your guide, so we better understand when blood > unholy. (which i also requested on sonsoflich forum, but the admin deleted it saying i was off topic).